For the past years I have been defragging my HDDs not under Win98, but under WinXP. I uninstalled Diskeeper Pro v9 from Win98SE about 4 years ago, and since then I have no defragging software installed under Win98, except for MS Disk Defragmenter, which I don't use.
I have on my dual-core desktop 2 instances of WinXP, one running on a FAT32 partition, the other running on an NTFS partition. The boot partition is FAT16. A separate FAT32 swap partition contains the fixed-size 3888MB swap files of Win98 and of WinXP(Fat32); the swap file of WinXP(NTFS) is on its NTFS partition.
I frequently create under Win98, with Norton Ghost v11.0.2 (standalone) and the switches -z9 -cns -fatlimit -szee in the desktop shortcut, backups of the WinXP(FAT32) partition. Before creating the .gho file of the WinXP(FAT32) partition, I boot into WinXP(NTFS) and defragment from there the WinXP(FAT32) partition with PerfectDisk v8.0.67, then I boot back into Win98 to create the .gho partition image.
I would like to defragment the WinXP(FAT32) partition under Win98. Which Win98-compatible defragging software can be recommended for this purpose? The defragging software should work fine under plain vanilla Win98SE with:
- big PATA drives (up to 750GB)
- big SATA drives (up to 2TB)
- primary and logical FAT32 partitions up to 240GB (on external drives and on internal HDDs with patches for the 137GB problem)
- HDDs connected via USB 2.0/eSATA I, maybe also via Firewire
- other partition types on the HDD (NTFS, Linux) (i.e. the defragmentation software should not damage them)
- Unicode/WinXP-compatible file and directory names
- files up to 4 GB in size
- a dual-core CPU under Win98
There is a very interesting thread at but I am interested specifically in Win98 software which works with modern hardware. I am hesitant about experimenting with various old defragging programs on my HDDs, maybe someone here has already done it already. I only need basic defragmentation and free space optimization on demand, no optimization of file and directory locations, no automatic runs in the background.